Anna Julia Cooper, Visionary Black Feminist

A Critical Introduction

Vivian M. May

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415956437
• eBook ISBN: 9781135911553
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Vivian M. May explores the theoretical and political contributions of Anna Julia Cooper, a renowned Black feminist scholar, educator and activist whose ideas deserve far more attention than they have received. Drawing on Africana and feminist theory, May places Cooper's theorizing in its historical contexts and offers new ways to interpret the evolution of Cooper's visionary politics, subversive methodology, and defiant philosophical outlook. Rejecting notions that Cooper was an elitist duped by dominant ideologies, May contends that Cooper's ambiguity, code-switching, and irony should be understood as strategies of a radical methodology of dissent.

May shows how across six decades of work, Cooper traced history's silences and delineated the workings of power and inequality in an array of contexts, from science to literature, economics to popular culture, religion to the law, education to social work, and from the political to the personal. May emphasizes that Cooper eschewed all forms of mastery and called for critical consciousness and collective action on the part of marginalized people at home and abroad. She concludes that in using a border-crossing, intersectional approach, Cooper successfully argues for theorizing from experience, develops inclusive methods of liberation, and crafts a vision of a fundamentally egalitarian social imaginary.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Preface
• Foreword, Beverly Guy-Sheftall
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: “A Woman of Rare Courage and Conviction”
• 1 “A little more than ordinary interest in the underprivileged” Cooper’s Lifelong Commitment to Liberation
• 2 “Life must be something more than dilettante speculation” Cooper’s Multidimensional Praxis
• 3 “If you object to imaginary lines — don’t draw them!” Cooper’s Border-Crossing Methods
• 4 “Failing at the most essential provision of the revolutionary ideal” Lessons from France and Haiti’s Transatlantic Struggle over Abolition and Égalité
• 5 Mapping Sites of Power Cooper’s Redefinition of “the philosophic mind”
• 6 Tracing Resistant Legacies, Rethinking Intellectual Genealogies Reflections on Cooper’s Black Feminist Theorizing
• Notes
• References
• Index